Artificial Intelligence Used to Home In on New Fossil Sites

FREIGHTER GAP, Wyo.--On blisteringly hot desert sands, researchers crawled on their hands and knees avoiding fist-size cacti littering the ground. Their goal: collecting bones and teeth of some of the earliest known primates to shed light on the adaptations at the root of the evolutionary lineage that led to humans. The fossils, though, are the size of a fingernail or smaller, and they are scattered over an area of about 10,000 square kilometers in the rocky desert of Wyoming's Great Divide Basin. That's a lot of ground to cover, especially on all fours and in searing heat. So the scientists are relying on a tool never tried before in paleontology: artificial intelligence.